Cyclists as postmen with raggle-taggle dreams

Toby Clements reviews One More Kilometre and We're in the Showers by Tim Hilton

Everyone has his story of the way he became a cyclist and One More Kilometre… is Timoshenko Hilton's. He was an only child. His parents were, as you might guess, communists. One summer they left him with his grandparents without saying goodbye. (They left a note: "We shall be in Paris at suppertime." "Bon appétit, comrades everywhere," remarks Hilton.) He found a bike in his grandparents' garage and took to it as a natural. From there he joined a local cycle club and his enthusiasm took off.

Tim Hilton went on to become an art critic and to write several biographies of artists, including a Life of John Ruskin, but cycling remains his great love. Now in his sixties, he has 12 bicycles in his shed and puts in 10,000 miles a year.

The bulk of the memories that fill this book come from the 1950s and 1960s - a golden age for cycling everywhere. On the continent Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartalli were battling it out in the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. Their supporting cast included such greats as Raphael Geminiani ("le Grand fusil"), Louison Bobet, Ferdi Kubler and Charly Gaul (a great climber, despite being from Luxembourg).

Hilton, with real understanding and verve, relates the way in which their various rivalries affected the races. This is exciting stuff: cycling at its most glamorous.

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In Britain things were rather different. There are no big races that close roads, and the sight of the peleton flashing through sunflower fields is alien to us. Nevertheless, Hilton's description of the life of an average racing cyclist at the time is poignant. He describes meetings in village halls before dawn and 25-mile time trials through the deserted lanes of Warwickshire.

His subjects belong to a slice of society that is usually overlooked: no-nonsense, self-reliant men and women, often from skilled working-class backgrounds, teaching their children to cycle within the society of thriving cycling clubs, dedicated to the "culture of the bike". The best British cyclists competed, without much success, on the continent but few photos of these men remain. Only one or two - of the beefy and faintly rascally Reg Harris and the bullet-headed Brian Robinson - are reprinted here.

But Hilton does not overlook the romance of the road. At one point he asks the intriguing, possibly answerless, question: "For what is a cyclist, if he is not a postman who dreams of being a gypsy?" What indeed.

Hilton is a brilliantly quirky, inventive writer. He begins a paragraph about the Isle of Man like this: "On a bike I can go anywhere – and in my own book, if I like, I can go on and on about the Isle of Man." He does exactly this – to the point of providing a bald list of the names of various boarding houses that he offers in support of some theory about the island retaining characteristics of each of the countries that make up the British Isles.

This is only one of the many lists he offers: others are of small-time bicycle manufacturers (Les Ephgrave, Stan Pike, Tommy Godwin, Brian Rourke… it goes on and on), of 19 women who left club dinners with tiaras in their handbags, of all 16 hills you have to climb in the Ronde van Vlaanderen ("names that should be known by every schoolboy!") as well as their distance in kilometres from the race's Bruges start.

His digressions are always fruitful, often startling and revelatory. The rivalry between Coppi and Bartalli was covered for the Corriere della Sera by Dino Buzzati. His reports from the Giro d'Italia, Hilton notes, were "queer" because Buzzati was a great fan of Kafka. "We can safely say that Kafka has a negative influence on sports journalism. For everything in the Czech writer's world is preordained by mysterious and implacable forces. It is a world without history or geography. It actors are helpless."

Cycling has had a more productive relationship with literature elsewhere, though. Samuel Beckett went to watch the racing at the Vel d'Hiver, a cycle track in Paris, and heard some boys talking outside. "On attend Godeau," one of them said. Roger Godeau was a cyclist who raced at the Vel d'Hiver.

There are some lines that bring you up short: commenting on never having seen the inside of the Vel d'Hiver before it was knocked down, Hilton says: "This is a sadness to me, yet another lesson that childhood does not gather enough experience to satisfy memory in wistful age."

This is unnecessarily modest of him. One More Kilometre… is a wonderful testament to a life in the saddle.